And the Winner is...

Tonight, I had every intention of going to the hospital to try to persuade people in the ER waiting room to fill out surveys for my thesis to complete my master's degree in disaster medicine. That entails going to work on my day off and periodically spouting off a script along the lines of:

"Excuse me ladies and gentlemen. Sorry to interrupt your ER visit, but my name is Leslie and I'm a graduate student working on a project that... (the rest of my blurb is of no consequence)

All that while my co-workers snicker behind me in the triage window.

I had two strikes against me though, both of them the result of sheer exhaustion.

Strike One: Yes, as the seventh of eight children, I have enjoyed and even sought after attention. We have one family home video of me as a five-year old that proves it. It takes energy to be the center of attention, though, and I just didn't have it at the end of the day.

Strike Two: I am no salesman. Rested or not rested. I remember well as a pre-teen the agony of collecting money from people on my paper route who actually owed me money. One particularly miserable evening, I sat in the passenger seat outside a customer's house as I mustered up all the courage I had and said to my mom sitting in the driver's seat

"Mom, I would rather be locked in a cellar with rats than go collecting."

Tonight I would have preferred a cellar with rats, so when my cousin Adam suggest we bake pies with the loads of blackberries he'd brought over for me and my roommate, it didn't seem like such a shabby alternative. Soon, the pie baking turned into a contest - Ahlborn vs. Ahlborn. Only one Ahlborn could win...

In corner Number One: LESLIE AHLBORN!!!!!!!!!!!!

In corner Number Two: Adam Ahlborn!!!!!!

Now some of you may be thinking, "Gee, that's not a fair fight...Leslie loves to cook and makes the best cookies in the world!" How little you all know...as far as I can remember, my last attempt to make a pie was my first attempt to make a pie - at the age of 12. I was visiting my siblings in Provo, UT as my parents went back east for conferences regarding my dad's PhD. This coincided with the 4th of July which meant that if I wanted to keep up the tradition of loads of pies to celebrate Independence Day, I had to make the pies. Mom patiently worked with me for days before departure to teach me her secrets of chocolate cream, banana cream, and coconut cream pie. "How hard could it be?" I ignorantly wondered, "You just make the pudding filling (which Mom always does from scratch), bake the pie shells, and then dump the one in the other..."

Or so I thought...4th of July rolled around, and I didn't my very 12-year-old best to retrace the steps my mom had taught me...but the pies didn't look...or taste...anything like Mom's! They looked something like anemic-albino-flavorless-chewy-instead-of-flaky pie crusts with lumpy-bumpy pudding filling. There was LOTS of left over pie that year...

So you see, tonight was a fair fight...just because I decided to use the framework of a recipe and Adam didn't...

I wasn't so sure of his stove approach...

But we had fun, although my expression appears to be one of annoyance...

And Adam was quite confident in his product

So much so he almost took a bite out of it before it was cooked

In the end...we both ended up making blackberry soup rather than pies...but they tasted good - or at least mine did ;). Can you guess which it was? Yes, the one with Mom's signature crust crimping.

And the truth: the true pie baker is my roommate Kirsten, but she played photographer instead. This was, after all, only the amateur competition.